The Series G funding for Databricks was led by Franklin Templeton, and was joined by investment from other new investors, including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity Management & Research LLC, and Whale Rock.

Existing shareholders participating in the round include Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz, Alkeon Capital Management, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Coatue Management, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Tiger Global Management.

Additionally, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce Ventures have added to the latest backing of Databricks as new strategic investors.

The funding will go towards accelerating innovation, and will allow Databricks to scale and support the rapid adoption of the lakehouse, which is quickly becoming the data architecture of choice for data-driven organisations.

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“We see this investment and our continued rapid growth as further validation of our vision for a simple, open and unified data platform that can support all data-driven use cases, from BI to AI,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks.

“Built on a modern lakehouse architecture in the cloud, Databricks helps organisations eliminate the cost and complexity that is inherent in legacy data architectures so that data teams can collaborate and innovate faster.

“This lakehouse paradigm is what’s fueling our growth, and it’s great to see how excited our investors are to be a part of it.”

Jonathan Curtis, senior vice-president, research analyst and portfolio manager at Franklin Templeton, commented: “Franklin Templeton is excited to work with Databricks as they enter this next stage of their impressive journey.

“We’ve seen first hand their ability to help enterprises leverage data to better understand customer journeys, operationalise business processes and, ultimately, build competitive advantage rooted in data.

“We believe they have a strong, accomplished team and visionary platform, and believe that the future for Databricks is bright, with a clear leadership position and open-ended growth opportunity.”

Scott Guthrie, executive vice-president, cloud and AI at Microsoft Corporation, added: “Azure Databricks continues to be an impressive solution that brings the latest advances in open, flexible and scalable data and AI capabilities to our customers.

“Our investment underscores the vision we share with Databricks of simplifying data and AI for our customers.

“Together, we will continue to build on the success of Azure Databricks and seamless integrations across Azure data services to enable cloud-scale analytics and AI on Azure.”